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On the first of October I brought you Phillip Carlson, a Canberra-based engineer, who bought a shitbox Leaf in 2012. Today he says it’s down to just 40 kilometres per charge, or 25 in winter with the heater on. So it’s little more than heavily depreciated roadside furniture at that point.
That shitbox has a design defect. There’s no heat exchanger protecting the battery. So it gets too hot, and it dies early - especially in warm environments, where the mercury regularly nudges 40 degrees C in summer, like where Mr Carlson lives.
Unlike other EVs on the same evolutionary timeline those Nissan arseholes cut serious corners on R&D. And now they expect owners to pay.
It’s basically impossible to cool those batteries passively, and it’s impossible to think those Nissan clowns did not know about this in R&D. Passive cooling won’t work. You cannot hang the batteries out in the breeze, for convection, because they have to be weather sealed and well protected against mechanical damage
The battery installation is badly designed. They overheat and they crap out early.
According to the ACCC, the ‘refund’ test examines the length of time it’s reasonable for the product to be used, and the amount of time it’s reasonably expected to tolerate use before failure. The warranty status is not part of the ‘refund’ test. Your shitbox Leaf can be out of warranty and you may still be entitled to a full refund if it fails badly enough, early enough.
If I paid $53,500 for a car, as Mr Carlson did, I’d expect it to be useful for more than 90,000 kilometres and seven years.
Instead of doing the right thing by customers and obeying consumer law, honouring the refund obligation, those Nissan arseholes dumped this steaming pile of bullshit into the laps of Leaf owners Down Under:
“Nissan put in place a battery exchange program on April 1st for any customers of a series 1 LEAF where their Lithium-Ion battery no longer provided the owner with the capacity to support their driving range requirements.” - Ben Warren, National Manager for Electrification and mobility at Nissan Shitsville
I’m no lawyer, but that certainly seems somewhat less than the law requires, at least to me.
“Beyond the manufacturer’s warranty period, Nissan has introduced a subsidised battery exchange program for vehicles sold by its Australian dealers.” - Nissan
Export-grade bullshit: Let us be quite clear about who’s subsidising who. Nissan is not subsidising the cost of premature battery replacement on shitbox Leafs. You are paying $10,000 - plus fitting. Therefore you are subsidising Nissan for the company’s shit R&D.
These arseholes are profiteering from their own crap engineering. That’s grossly immoral and completely unethical. And you’re not even getting a new battery pack - my understanding is: it’s a refurbished one, on an exchange basis. And only if you meet some bullshit criteria.
“Whilst the cost is above $10K after labour, it is a 24Kw battery and when you consider the costs of a home battery storage system of that capacity – it actually compares quite favourably.” - Nissan
Exactly the same bullshit refurbished battery program, introduced at exactly the same time in Japan costs 300,000 Yen, which is only $4200 Shitsville dollars.
Why is Nissan charging Australian Leaf owners more than double what the Japanese pay? It’s exactly the same battery in exactly the same car. If you’ve ever wondered what reverse-racism looks like, in the automotive industry, this is it.
